With the advent of video cassette recorders (“VCRs”), compact disks (“CDs”), digital versatile disks (“DVDs”), and other portable and convenient media for storing and transporting audio-video information, there has arisen a market for rental of movies and other products (hereinafter, collectively “AV products”) for personal home viewing. Numerous retail rental stores offering AV products have appeared, as well as stand-alone rental kiosks and even rent-by-mail operations, providing the home viewer with numerous options for renting AV products.
Because portable media and the various portable media players generally available do not allow tracking of each use of a given individual AV product, it is difficult for AV product providers to actually determine how many times each AV product is viewed.
Also, unfortunately, with the advent of portable media, there has also arisen a market for “illegal” or “pirated” copies of AV products—copies produced and distributed in violation of the copyright laws of the United States or relevant jurisdiction(s). Thus, it is difficult for AV product providers or retail rental store operators to identify how many pirated copies are publicly circulating.
Piracy of AV products represents a significant loss to the organizations which create, market and sell AV products. Moreover, piracy leads to losses not only for these organizations, but for their employees, shareholders, actors, production persons, marketing, and even to the public treasury which suffer due to both lost revenue from lost legitimate sales and charge-offs by organizations whose sales are directly affected by the piracy.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,678,215 discloses a cassette for use with a VCR tape designed to facilitate rentals based on frequency of use. The cassette disclosed in the '215 patent is not a standard cassette and requires an opening in an end wall and a counter at the opposite end operated by levers and rods, etc. actuated by a specially designed member on the recorder chassis.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,475,222 discloses a VCR tape cassette with a use counter in which the use counter is incremented upon insertion or removal of the cassette into or out of the recorder.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,553,252 discloses a similar cartridge or cassette for holding a computer software CD.
One difficulty encountered with existing counters is that they are limited to being readable either by a machine, for example using a bar code, or by individuals, e.g., through the use of an alpha-numeric display.
It is thus desirable for an electrical counter to display and update in both a human-readable and a machine-readable format simultaneously.
It is also desirable to provide an electric timer for AV products to allow quick and accurate determination of an AV product's rental time to a rental outlet.